Magnificence (18 page)

Susan turned and leaned back against the counter, the thin coat of frost on the cardboard tube melting swiftly against her fingertips.

“So because I’m single and live in a big house, all of a sudden I’m in loco parentis to your senile mother-in-law. You think I have no life of my own, right? I’m some kind of convenient middle-aged caregiver?”

“Not caregiver,” said Casey. “That’s why we’d hire someone. More of a hostess. A rich relative offering room and board.”

“Huh,” said Susan. She peeled the white ring from around the lid of the tube and dropped it into the sink.

“It makes sense,” said Casey. “You have to admit.”

“For you it does, sure,” said Susan. “Yes. It works out perfectly for you. Then there’s me. If Angela decides she doesn’t like the woman you hire, she’s my responsibility. And I’m basically up a creek. Like with that nice girl Merced. Angela ran away from her because she didn’t like her footwear. Did I tell you that already? She accused her of wearing shoes a hooker would wear. And then she showed up here in the middle of the night in a taxi that cost me like two hundred dollars. She left her wallet at home. Of course. I mean Jesus. I’m fond of T. and all, but I’m not the one who married him.”

“She won’t show up in the middle of the night, though, because she’ll already be here.”

Susan turned. She was holding up the tube, letting clumps of concentrate drop into the pitcher.

“I think you’re missing my point there, Case.”

Casey just gazed up at her, large-eyed.

“Fucking fine, then,” said Susan finally. “God
damn
it.”

Casey crowed with delight and threw her arms around Susan’s waist.

•

After Casey left she went out to the backyard and through the trees. The jackhammer guy had left a gray moon of dust on the trampled grass around the manhole cover. She knelt beside the lid, traces of cement still adhering to the grooves, and studied it: no words, only a diamond pattern that reminded her obscurely of pineapples and beehives. Couldn’t she just lift it up? But there was no handhold, no opening.

“Backhoe,” she said to herself.

Certainly it was a fool’s errand. Still, she would make some calls to the city.

J
im rented a U-Haul and drove his few possessions from the house he had shared with his wife in Palos Verdes, which Susan had never seen, to a small dove-gray bungalow in Silver Lake.

She went over the morning he moved in, carrying tall cups of coffee for both of them, and stood on the covered front porch with its square stucco columns. She liked the view out the uncovered wing of the porch, down to the bottom of the hill where the narrow street of cottage-like houses, about as quaint as you got in L.A., gave way to a dirty wide street of businesses and fast traffic. Rows of palms like truffula trees, with blowzy tops and spindly, bending trunks, stood out against the sky.

She liked the house, which was a finer, older version of the one she and Hal had lived in back in Santa Monica. It had more style but some of the same elements: the burnished-looking hardwood floors, the well-carved mantel over the fireplace, dark beams on the ceilings that crossed each other to make rectangle patterns against the white. She was impressed by the spareness of the rooms that contained Jim’s pared-down life, the neat stacks of folded shirts, the three small cases of law books.

•

That afternoon the new caregiver took up residence in the big house to prepare for Angela’s arrival the next day—a stout woman in her early sixties with dyed black hair and lipstick the color of traffic cones. It strayed over the edges of her lips.

Casey had decided to hire an older woman, essentially an imitation of Vera since her mother-in-law’s brief track record with young women was poor. In fact she had chosen another Eastern European lady, this one hailing not from the former Yugoslavia but from some obscure yet quite large district of the Russian Federation, one that sounded like a mouthful of half-chewed nuts. Her name was Oksana and she brought with her a tall bamboo cage, two zebra finches inside.

Angela would sleep in the bird room, which Susan regretted since it would no longer be free for Jim and her. But it was the only room on the ground floor that was set up with a bed and its own bath; Casey had said that Angela got up at night, not sleepwalking but wandering around bleary and half-asleep without the capacity to notice her surroundings. She thought the second floor would be dangerous. Oksana needed a location nearby but the best Susan could do was the drawing room full of raccoons and minks, a few doors down.

T. brought in a daybed, which they set behind a pair of the old man’s decorative screens, scenes of mallards swimming on glassy lakes with bulrushes in the foreground. Oksana hung up her cage, set up a small portable television with T.’s help, and unpacked her suitcase into the room’s narrow closet.

“We don’t know how long we’ll be,” he explained to Susan, as she surveyed the mounts.

She had to fix them in her memory. She wouldn’t be able to go into the room whenever she wanted to now and she resented it, though admittedly Oksana asked for almost nothing. The Russian even lacked her own bathroom; she’d have to walk down the hall to use the toilet or take a shower. The house was large but it wasn’t set up for assisted living.

Item 1: A coatimundi from Arizona needed repair; insects must have gotten to it recently because parts of the face looked mangy. Could be the larvae of carpet or fur beetles . . . and there was mold on it, she guessed, either mold or mildew; ask the repair people, install a dehumidifier if need be. Item 2: One of the minks was incorrect, she had learned from a reference book in the library. The teeth were not its own. Possibly they had belonged to a housecat. Replace. Also the eyes were bulging. The wadding inside had likely expanded: another humidity problem.

“So I’ve paid Oksana’s wages in advance,” he was saying. “Angela has an ample allowance. Let Oksana handle her food, her bills, all that, the same way Vera did. Here’s hoping she’s capable. I’ll take a look at the debits and credits when I get back, but you shouldn’t have to be involved at all. That sound OK to you?”

“Fine, sure,” she murmured. She wondered if Oksana would be disturbed by the flash of canines at night, if, say, a car passed outside and illuminated the crouching raccoon. It held a half-bitten slice of lurid fuchsia watermelon, made of vinyl chloride.

Then again, she’d noticed, some people didn’t notice the faces; to some, like the young architect girl, the taxidermy was nothing more than a design element, albeit a misguided one.

“Where we’re going,” he said, “there won’t always be reliable telecommunication. Casey doesn’t want you to be worried.”

“I promise,” she said after a minute. “This time I won’t send anyone to track you down.”

•

Jim was spending more nights in the big house now. While he did not seem overjoyed by the arrival of Angela and Oksana, he was not displeased either; he liked the arbitrariness of their encounters, Susan thought. He was amused by the sight of Angela wandering into the kitchen at some odd hour of late night or early morning, her hair twisted up into a peach-hued turban, matching kaftan floating out behind her as she walked and a muddy facial mask with holes around her eyes and mouth. He smiled at Susan when Angela summoned him into the bathroom to remove a stray hair from the sink. He enjoyed her sporadic remarks about the hazards of all-American dining chains like Denny’s, to which she objected strenuously. It had to do with the portion size and the dominance of fried foods, apparently. Also the fact that the menus contained large photographs of each selection and were covered with plastic.

He found her humorous, Susan thought, despite the fact that her comedic value stemmed from mental decline. He was not worried about the moral dimensions of his entertainment.

Oksana also amused him. She represented an enigma.

“What’s with the lipstick all over the place,” he said after dinner one night, when the old women had gone to bed.

He and Susan were drinking wine in the backyard, watching helicopters cross the sky and listening to a chorus of far-off sirens. Jim liked the sound.

“Does she do it on purpose? It makes her look even crazier than the other one.”

“I think it was the fashion once,” said Susan. “To kind of draw on the contours of your upper lip. To make it look like you had, you know, these Cupid’s-bow lips.”

“Cupid’s bow?”

“With two, kind of, bumps on top? Like Lucille Ball or someone.”

“She wants to look like Lucille Ball? She looks like a bag lady. Seriously. With the dyed black hair that gets gray at the roots and the day-glo lips. We have a bag lady living with us. Are you sure she’s a nurse?”

“She’s not exactly a nurse. I don’t really know what she is.”

She dropped one of her shoes on the ground and trailed her bare toes in the pond water. She wondered if the fish would come nibble at them.

“Nothing wrong with a bag lady. It’s not a criticism, per se,” said Jim. “I’m just saying.”

“Yeah, don’t ask me,” said Susan vaguely. She was feeling the water, soft and cool as her foot swept through it. “All I care about is that Angela likes her.”

“So far,” said Jim. “Don’t get too comfortable.”

•

The dog came last. Casey and T. dropped her off the day before they left. They were booked on a series of flights to get to Borneo—through Hong Kong, Taipei, and Jakarta.

“I still don’t get what you’re going across the globe to do,” said Susan to Casey, standing talking to her through the window of the parked car while T. took the dog inside.

“His deal is, poor people that need to make a living, and then these dying-off animals,” said Casey. “He wants to make it so people don’t have a good reason to do things that kill the wildlife. So what there is, over there, is some kind of jungle forestry project. Community harvest of non-timber products is what they call it. It sounds so wonky, right? He’s trying to help these local guys set it up so the people can live off this one forest without cutting it or burning it down. There’s animals living there that need the forest. This Sumatran rhino that’s practically gone. Also orangutans and pygmy elephants. He loves those little fuckers.”

“So what are
you
going to do?”

“We’ve got this cabin lined up,” said Casey. “It’s primitive. No indoor toilets. But you can send faxes from this town that isn’t so far away, you just give them to the driver who comes out with food deliveries. Two times a week, they said. And sometimes we’ll go into town for errands and I can call you then. So my job? I’m going to handle the paperwork, to start with.”

“Huh. No toilets?” said Susan.

“Other priorities.”

“But what if . . .”

“What if what,” said Casey.

“Health concerns,” said Susan. “The lack of pavement.”

“Oh please,” said Casey.

Susan saw her wheels caught in rainforest mud, her chair sinking into quicksand. It seemed wrong.

“All settled in,” said T., opening his car door and sliding behind the wheel. “She’s in my mother’s room right now.”

“T. How’s Casey going to get around, in Borneo?” asked Susan. “I’m serious. She has to have her independence. What about emergencies? Seriously. The
jungle
?”

“Listen,” said T. “We don’t want you to worry. We bought her an all-terrain wheelchair. A power chair with these big wheels. She’s been practicing on it at the beach. But more to the point, the facility where we’re staying is part of a research-station complex. It has gravel paths between the buildings. A couple are even paved. It’s not all dirt.”

“It just doesn’t seem like an appropriate setting,” said Susan after a few seconds, anxious.

“Fuck appropriate,” said Casey.

“I don’t—”

“And fuck setting,” said Casey. “I’m not a lawn ornament.”

“Susan, you have my word,” said T. “If mobility is a problem, we’ll leave.”

“Don’t get all paternalistic just because we’re married,” said Casey. “If I want to leave I’ll say so. I have the power of speech.”

“Not what we meant,” said Susan.

“Yeah, yeah. I know. But I think you both get me.”

“OK,” said Susan. “OK. I just worry.”

“You don’t have to,” said Casey.

Susan stared down for a while and finally leaned in to kiss her on the cheek.

“Do my best, then,” she said.

She watched as the black Mercedes reversed, Casey waving out the open window, and pulled away.

8

“I
t’s not one of theirs,” said Jim, when he got off the phone with the city of Pasadena.

There were old women milling around them in the kitchen, wearing pastel colors and cheerfully garish prints. One blouse had numerous teddy bears, with pink and blue bows around their necks.

Angela had invited some friends over, unbeknownst to Susan, who had believed she had none. Without prior warning the house had filled with elderly ladies from a church book club.

Angela wore a delicate crucifix and went to mass now and then, when she suddenly felt the need, but her beliefs were opaque to Susan. The other churchgoers she knew were all old and most were also female; only the old attended church these days, she’d told Susan solemnly, unless you counted the poverty-stricken, ethnic, or Deep South states where, if you believed the statistics, millions were joyously awaiting the Rapture. But these were not Catholics. Angela’s church was part white and part Mexican, she said, and the whites were all old because young whites did not believe in God. Thus the book group was elderly white ladies devoted to reading Christian novels and discussing them.

There were, said Angela, some old white men in the congregation too, but if they read at all they tended to avoid fiction, which they believed was frivolous. And anyway the novels favored by the book club often had a romantic bent, even though they contained references to Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the apostles, the saints, and other popular and interesting characters in the Bible. Some were historical, telling the stories of these biblical figures, while others were just about regular people now, Angela said—regular people who were godly. Usually they were also Catholic, but not always.

Angela had recently attended a meeting of the group on impulse, her first time. She quickly volunteered Susan’s house for the next meeting, then forgot she’d done so until the ladies arrived. They’d brought food with them—macaroni casseroles, triangular white-bread sandwiches, powdered diet drinks and frozen layer cakes. Curiously they had also brought stacks and stacks of paper napkins, napkins by the hundreds.

“They don’t know anything about it,” went on Jim, over the white, wavy head of a half-deaf woman sipping lemonade from a paper cup. “The guy said he never heard of that—a manhole in someone’s backyard that wasn’t authorized by the city. I got the feeling he didn’t actually believe me.”

“I should probably just leave it alone, shouldn’t I,” said Susan. “It could be part of some ancient sewage system the city doesn’t use anymore.”

Jim shrugged. The white-haired lady hovered between them, not moving or seeming to register their presence; she drank her lemonade with sucking sounds and stared with watery blue eyes into the great beyond.

“I don’t know,” he said after a minute. “You wanted to do something with that part of the yard, was that it?”

“I want to make sure there isn’t a basement,” said Susan.

“A basement? It’s a manhole. It’s hundreds of yards from the house.”

“I know.”

“Listen,” he said, and looked down again at the white wave hovering beneath his chin. “I really need to get going to the office. It’s halfway through the day already.”

“So go, so go,” she said, and smiled at him as the lady drinking lemonade kept standing there, clueless.

He loved his wife, she thought as he left the kitchen, or rather his ex-wife, now; he loved her and he always would. In this house there was unrequited love and there was love of the dead. She and Jim cherished these two streams of affection, at once different and the same: they lived inside two loves that went out and did not come back to them.

•

Casey had decided to send faxes instead of letters. Airmail from Borneo took too long, she wrote, while faxes were instant.

She had them sent to the machine in T.’s office, and Susan would come in on good mornings to find their curled pages waiting for her, thin and slick, some of them always fallen or fan-blown to the floor. The pages had no numbers, typically, only long disorderly paragraphs of Casey’s barely legible scrawl interspersed with
!!!
and
???
so often she had to piece them together painstakingly, the last word of one to the first word of the next, before she could begin to read.

At first the places and even the facts seemed purely fictitious.

From here in Long Banga to the clear-cuts in Gulung Mulu . . .

On the way we stopped in what claims to be “Berkeley’s sister city”: Uma Bawang.

Among the Penan of Upper Baram, murder, rape, and robbery are unknown. Selfishness is considered a crime.

After a few letters she stopped grinning reflexively every time she encountered a foreign word. It wasn’t funny, of course. Indeed the current events Casey described were alarming: episodes of police brutality, conflicts between the natives and the logging companies, the wholesale liquidation of primary forests, the erosion of mountaintops and massacre of wildlife. But there was also the day-to-day, and Casey included rough, childish sketches of the local fauna, as though they might be added, by proxy, to Susan’s collection.

She started with a mount that hung in a tourist lodge near the research station, a civet cat, and then moved on to living subjects. There was a male proboscis monkey with a huge dangling nose like an ancient drunkard, beneath which she had written
The big nose is thought to be attractive to females
; there was a pangolin, a distant anteater relative, with the legend
Talk about freaks
. The monkey had its dangling, pear-shaped nose, then also a large potbelly and beneath that a small red penis sticking out. Susan knew the color because Casey had drawn an arrow toward the offending organ and written
red
.

Next there were drawings of people, women with earlobes stretched all the way down to their chests, heavy earrings pulling down the impossibly long holes—six inches, seven or eight.
Orang Ulu
, wrote Casey. An ancient man with boar’s teeth piercing the tops of his ears:
Village elder, Bungan festival in Punan Sama
.

Casey rarely wrote about herself or her feelings except to mention a casual fact briefly:
Our shower is a bag of water with holes in it
. Or
I do miss the junk food
. And
Sucks to do laundry once a month
. Still her daughter was close there, in the unkempt script and the abrupt turns of thoughts—in some ways closer than when she was home.

Susan hoarded the faxed letters. She read them to remind herself of the realness and texture of Casey whenever she felt afraid. One foreign place was not the same as all others; Casey would not fall under a knife. She kept the pages stapled, smoothed flat, although they wanted to curl, and pressed between two big dictionaries she carried up to her bedroom from the library.

But they did not last. She was distressed to notice how quickly the ink faded.

O
ne afternoon she got home after a half-day at the office to find Angela leading some church ladies through the second-floor rooms, pointing out both the taxidermy and the house’s architectural features.

“The building has been nominated for historic status,” she said proudly, as Susan hovered in the hallway.

There was a message from the estate lawyer in Century City, whom Jim had pushed to give her case more attention: a date had been set for the adjudication of the cousins’ will contest. She felt her stomach sink when she heard this—did that mean the case had not been dismissed, or something, as they had hoped it would? Or could it still be dismissed?

Jim would explain when he got in, she told herself, and went outside to where the church ladies were picking their way through the back garden, gazing down into the fishponds and nodding. Angela had her arm around one of them—the white-haired one from the kitchen, hobbling unsteadily.

Worried about the will, hoping for some distraction, Susan hurried toward them, on a path to overtake. As she came up behind the last in the group—an imperious fat lady in red and gold and another, in gray, who looked timid and thin by contrast—the white-hair with Angela stumbled and emitted a gasp of fright.

“You’re all right, Ellie dear,” said Angela, whose arm had stopped her from falling. “You’ll be fine.”

“Tripped me,” said the lady.

“Let’s see,” said Susan.

In the pebbly soil between the flagstones of the path, at the white-haired lady’s feet, was a thin piece of black tubing.

“Part of the irrigation system,” said Susan.

“It’s unsafe,” said Angela.

Susan gazed at her.

“It waters my garden,” she said after a pause, irritably.

“This way, honey,” murmured Angela, but she gave Susan a punitive look.

•

When Jim came over after work three of the ladies were still present, in Oksana’s room off the entrance hall. It was almost six-thirty in the evening and they had never left; they sat there in armchairs and, as far as Susan could tell, said hardly anything. There was the oldest—the white-haired lady—and the slight one in gray and the large one bedecked in the colors of the Chinese emperors. They each had a copy of a Christian novel nearby; this one featured a handsome angel who flew down to earth to help a single mother with a crippled child, then fell in love with her. A couple of them even had drinks beside them. The conversation appeared to be moving with exceeding slowness.

When Susan and Jim came to stand in the doorway Angela was telling the plot of the novel. The other ladies ignored them.

“The angel starts out too proud, you see,” said Angela, and turned to Susan. “You see, the angels that come down to help people are often the proud ones. God gives them penance. Having to come down from heaven is a punishment for them.”

In a corner, Oksana painted her fingernails fire-engine red and watched her small television. On the news, someone was dead.

“I mean it, they’re not moving,” whispered Susan to Jim, as they veered away from Oksana’s door and down the hall to the bar area where they liked to drink their dinnertime cocktails. “They’ve been here since like ten a.m
.
It’s like they’ve been installed. Like furniture.”

“But you can’t sit on them,” said Jim.

She poured him some scotch.

“The lawyer left a message for me,” she told him. “He said they set a court date. Is that bad?”

“It’s neutral. Look, wills get contested all the time. But will contests are hardly ever won by the people who bring the objection. Keep that in mind.”

“I was hoping maybe it wouldn’t even make it to court, though,” she said.

“I’ll go with you. Don’t think about it.”

•

As the evening wore on she and Jim grew fixated on the question of when the old ladies would leave. When ten, then eleven o’clock rolled around both of them were making trips down the hall so that they could walk past Oksana’s open door and see whether the ladies were still there. Then Jim would return or Susan would return to him, shaking their heads in disbelief. Susan was aware of acting vulture-like. The truth was it shouldn’t matter to her—the ladies were quiet and infringed upon no one but Oksana—but she was intrigued by the unlikeliness of the ladies’ presence, of their remaining in the room as though they were frozen there, as though they were inevitable.

Finally it was eleven and Susan hovered in Oksana’s doorway like a parent executing a curfew.

“Let me run something up the flag,” she said. “Maybe Jim or I could drive you ladies home tonight? Because night driving can be dangerous—”

“Oh no, dear,” said Angela. “No no
no
. We’re having a slumber party!”

The faces turned to her then, all three of the visitors staring. Oksana continued to ignore them and ignored Susan too, eyes fixed on a late-night talk show on the television. Susan noticed she had put on a nightgown.

“A slumber . . .”

“Oh yes. We’re sleeping in my room.”

Was Angela lucid?

“Oh,” said Susan uncertainly. “Ladies? Is that . . .”

They seemed to be nodding, though it was almost imperceptible in the dimness of the room. It struck her as absurd—either a comedy of errors or a group mania of some kind. They had to be in their late seventies and eighties; they must need comfortable beds, she thought, need their routine, their home environments; they must all have some complaint, minor or not, arthritis, bursitis, porous and brittle bones. There was no way they could intend to sleep in Angela’s bed, no way they could have made that plan on their own. Had Angela misled them about the facilities? Had they been fed? Was she even taking care of them?

“If you’re staying, please use the bedrooms on the second floor,” Susan said finally. “OK? There are plenty of beds up there. Most have their own bathrooms, though some share. Jim will be happy to help you up the stairs, if any of you needs a hand. Because frankly I can’t imagine you’ll all be comfortable in Angela’s room. There’s only the one bed in there! You realize that, don’t you?”

“Upstairs will be quite suitable,” said Angela, with a certain smugness.

“But then the staircase is hazardous too, or at least it could be,” objected Susan, recalling the white-haired lady—Ellen, she guessed—tripping on the small piece of black tubing.